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Episode #247 ... The Failure of the Modern University - Alasdair MacIntyre
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Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this patreon.com philosophizethis philosophical writing on substack at Philosophizthis on there. I hope you love the show today. So, in chapter seven of Alasdair MacIntyre's book the tasks of Philosophy, he asks us to imagine a scene of a few friends that decide they're going to get together one day. They're sitting at a table in a diner, ordering food, having a very normal conversation. It says, imagine if in this moment, one of the people speaks up and they ask their friends, what is the real point of even existing? Why shouldn't we all just give up on trying to do anything when we're in this world? You know, a philosophical question, the other people at the table hear this person and they understandably feel a little uncomfortable having to answer it. Maybe one of them feels embarrassed to even have to talk about something so personal, maybe to another friend. This is the very kind of question they're constantly trying to find ways to avoid. It's an abrasive moment, this moment in the diner is what I'm saying. But then McIntyre asks us to imagine a different scene side by side with this one. Now, imagine there's a philosopher who's standing up in front of a room of other philosophers at a seminar among academics. Imagine they ask the exact same content of the question, but maybe in this case, they ask it in a way that's filtered through terms and language that are common within the field of philosophy. Well, when it's asked at the seminar, nobody in that room even bats an eyelash at the question. Nobody's uncomfortable there. So how come in one moment this question is taken as something that's a challenge to the very existence of the people that hear it? But in the other moment, Nothing. To Alistair MacIntyre, once you know the answer to this question, he thinks you'll realize two things that are very important about the world you live in. One has to do with how philosophy has changed under the encyclopedic view that we have of things. And two is something deeply important about the university as a modern institution that he thinks deserves a lot of criticism for the kinds of thinkers it regularly produces. We'll get to all that he has to say about it by the end of this episode, but I think it's helpful to first clarify the scene in the diner a bit more. So, see, to MacIntyre, the reason the people in the diner reacted so differently to the people in the seminar is because in the diner, this is a real difficult question that's being asked of a real person about the stakes of their actual life on this planet. I mean, you ask a philosophical question in this way, and there's just going to be a certain number of people brave enough to take it seriously, and there's going to be a certain number of those people that have a full blown existential event because they heard it. A sort of, where did my life go? Wedding reception that I go to with myself. It's understandable. But, he says, contrast that with the philosophical seminar, where in today's academy it often takes the form of reducing philosophy into something like a professional technical skill. Now, to be clear, this is a skill that is navigated brilliantly by seasoned experts that are extensively trained in their field. No one's denying that. But his point is that this whole attitude of thinking of philosophy as a technical skill often, often separates the people that are doing philosophy from the deeper questions that gave anyone a reason to care about philosophy in the first place. To get started explaining his point here, let me just say that philosophy at bottom, for MacIntyre, always begins with some sort of a rift or attention within a real human experience, meaning. For all of recorded history, the questions that we ask in philosophy have not been magically created out of abstractions in a university classroom somewhere. Any questions that goes on at a higher level of abstraction like that can be traced back originally to some actual person that was rooted in a way of life where their community ran into some kind of a crisis that made them feel forced to ask deeper questions about it. See, philosophy begins for MacIntyre, when the old answers that used to do the job for us no longer do the job anymore. And the point is, what later becomes a philosophical debate that's going on at a seminar usually started much earlier for MacIntyre, in the experience of a human being trying to make sense of a real problem. This is why MacIntyre calls the questions that we explore in philosophy as rooted in the problems of plain persons, he says, which isn't a pejorative by any means. For him, this is a reuniting of philosophy with the causes that actually matter to us. And that's the strange thing about the world that MacIntyre thinks we live in. Now, consider for a second just how much of our lives, you know, living in the encyclopedic set of assumptions he's been talking about for three episodes. Now consider how much we've been trained to think of these deeper human questions that, like they're a totally separate thing from the roles we play in the world with most of our day. For example, imagine a doctor that gets someone's test results back and they got to give a person some bad news about their health. That doctor might ask, well, what level of disclosure here is necessary on my part? What information do I got to give this person and how do I say it to them correctly? And in an encyclopedic culture like ours, they may answer that question by considering what the law is. You know, a law that's been designed and adjusted over the years to help protect people. But the law here is just in reference to the deeper philosophical question of what is a human being owed in this moment when it comes to information about their body? And why is that? And even this just references an even deeper question you could ask of what kind of a being is a human? Were things like truth, hope, death even matter to them in the first place? Notice how easy it is for the doctor in this scenario to be a total expert when it comes to medicine, a technical skill, but be completely oblivious to the moral foundations of their shared practice of medicine is steeped in, to be removed from the reasons why it's important to us to have people studying medicine at all. See, the fact is, so many of the technical procedures this person follows every day when it comes to giving patients care, they are rooted, for MacIntyre, in these underlying assumptions about values we've been talking about, the answers to these deeper moral questions, that just as a doctor, they genuinely may be a person that's never even considered this stuff seriously. What he's saying is that especially in cultures dominated by the encyclopedic viewpoint, it is all too common for some of the most hyper educated, competent people we have to sort of bracket off philosophy and think of it as one of a number of different possible things. People think that philosophy is this kind of side quest where it's fun sometimes for people to speculate about what's possible, or that philosophy is this optional reflection some people can do if they happen to be interested in that sort of thing. Philosophy is often thought of as this purely subjective space where it's really just a personal opinion when you get down to it. I mean, I have my philosophy, you have your philosophy, but nothing can really say which one's better than any other. And none of this really helps us get anything done, practically speaking. So why does this even exist outside of a bunch of people who are addicted to thinking about stuff? But this is exactly how you'd expect people to think about it, who don't realize how much philosophy their actions are peddling every day that they never even consider. These are people who become living embodiments of a moral philosophy in almost everything they do, and they're hopeless to change anything about it because they see the one thing that could interrogate these deeper beliefs, philosophy, as something that's optional and or pointless. Again, for MacIntyre, no one out there is actually operating from a view from nowhere. And philosophy becomes something real easy to ignore when you think you are. There's a very important question he thinks we have to ask at this point in the conversation. Where did that doctor from our example earlier learn to think this way about philosophy in relation to their field of medicine? Well, one major place they were trained to think this way is in the modern university. This is the kind of thinker the modern university generally produces. See the moral traditions we've been talking about the last couple episodes. You can see the evidence of them in the institutions that emerge out of those moral traditions. You see it in things like how the workplace is typically organized. You see it in our families, our political communities. You see it in the organization of institutions that govern people like the state, and also in institutions that claim to educate people in schools and universities. And as you can imagine, you can look back at any single point in history, examine the institutions of the time. And one important measuring stick we can use to understand them better is to ask whether an institution helps or hurts the people of the time to participate in what MacIntyre calls a unified intellectual tradition. Does the institution make this easier or more difficult for people? Now, don't be thrown off by the word unified there. None of this means that everybody's agreeing on everything. The question is, do different forms of inquiry like physics, biology, philosophy, etc. Do these different fields all understand themselves as answerable to a larger argument we're all participating in about truth and the human good? I mean, picture a world with a bunch of compartmentalized fields that all see themselves as self contained, where a biologist, for example, to understand their work, only feels they need to understand it within the technical procedures of biology, meaning in practice, they end up pretty much only talking to other biologists, and see anything else outside of that as maybe interesting, maybe even respectable, but ultimately unnecessary to understanding what their own work is doing. Well, again, this is exactly the sort of thinker the modern university produces to MacIntyre. And it's funny because no biologist, if you pressed them on it, would ever deny that they do every bit of their work relying on background assumptions from other fields like, take physics, they'd acknowledge that every biological process they study is held together by the strong nuclear force, that every organism they study is ultimately tethered to the Earth by the laws of gravity. In other words, at some level, every one of these people understand that their work is part of some larger, unified intellectual tradition that brings in many assumptions that we're all beholden to. They understand biology contributes certain unique things to this tradition, that biology has limitations to what it can do, and the many other ideas outside of biology have real effects on their work. They understand this. And yet, in practice, the way so many of these technical experts operate is to be more like the philosophers at the academic seminar we talked about, to do their work as though they exist in some hermetically sealed compartment, totally removed from the deeper moral human implications that direct every single thing they do in their field. They're just philosophers doing work for other philosophers, biologists doing work for other biologists. And his point is, if there was an institution we have in the modern world that should be showing our experts how entangled their field is with this larger moral intellectual tradition they live in, it would be the university. And one of the big tragedies for Macintyre is that our universities generally don't just. If you were to take a step back and look at the university as an institution for a second, the same way the institution of the state during the Soviet Union detracted from people participating as well as they could in a strong intellectual traditional, the same way the institution of the Church wasn't helpful during the Spanish Inquisition. The Modern University, for MacIntyre, is a key institution in our world that is holding us back from exactly the integrated understanding it should be helping us to develop. He's saying it's a far cry from what universities have been for people in the past, say, in the high Middle Ages in the city of Paris, as an example. And he'd say part of what's been lost since then is the understanding that receiving an education at the highest level should be doing your work in consideration of a number of deeper questions that are just bracketed off in the modern university. They're treated as though they're outside of what you even do at a university. MacIntyre takes this point from the work of John Henry Newman in his book the Idea of a University. As MacIntyre explains it to Newman, when we say someone is educated, we don't just mean that someone has memorized a bunch of knowledge and become a technician in their field. And you can see that this is the case by just trying to answer the very simple question of what. What do we want a university to ultimately do to the mind of a student when they go there? Now, there's a lot of ways you could potentially answer that, depending on how you see education. And MacIntyre says to even start to try to answer it, you'd have to begin by asking something like, what is a university even for? But he thinks once you start exploring that question, you realize we first need an answer to something a bit more basic. How about, what is an education even for? Why do we care about it? Is it simply to produce research or technical experts? Is it to get people qualified to do jobs so we can keep them productive? Or if there's a part of you that thinks education has something to do with the attempt by humans to get closer and closer to the truth, well, why does the truth matter to the kinds of beings we are? His point is that this question would then require you to have an answer to an even deeper question of what kind of beings we are fundamentally. And this brings us to one of the big points MacIntyre wants us to consider about all this. Every institution is built and organized on top of answers that are assumed to these fundamental questions, and that our institutions are this way even when the people living in them pretend like they're value neutral, and even when the institution itself claims to not have set answers to these questions, like in the modern university. And imagine if this was the blind spot of the place that gave you your education on the world. It would no doubt produce people that are experts in their field, no question. But an education is not just about knowing facts Again, it's about knowing how each discipline bears on all the other disciplines out there. It's. It's to know what each discipline contributes to our unified intellectual tradition. It's about knowing what the limitations of each discipline are, not to mention all the philosophical assumptions that ground the entire project we're in. Consider how possible it is for someone to become world class at manipulating one little slice of reality while simultaneously becoming worse at understanding what their job means inside a life or a society. Think of a person that can optimize the bejesus out of a financial model. You're the White Claw chuggin legend of Scottsdale, Arizona, at some level. But you can't even answer basic questions about the kind of lives this thing is affecting. See, there's only one word that really makes sense here to describe what an education should give an expert in a field, and that to MacIntyre is good judgment. We don't just want a doctor that knows how to diagnose things. We want somebody that can judge what that diagnosis means in the life of, you know, this real person who's standing in front of me, Someone who gets that this is more than just about reading test results or protecting themselves legally. Someone who gets that they're dealing with a human being here where certain ends matter to them in their life. A doctor that understands how this one moment in an exam room connects more broadly to the goods that the practice of medicine is supposed to serve. What we're ultimately Describing here for MacIntyre is the concept from Aristotle he calls phronesis, or practical wisdom. 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That's I N C O g n I incogni.com philothis for 60% off and now back to the podcast, which brings me to one of the most fascinating points MacIntyre makes in the entire book about education. I think he says one of the insights somebody gets when they truly are educated in this way is that they realize they're always doing more than what they think they're doing. This can sound really weird at first, but his point is whenever you're doing anything, say you're outside digging a hole with a shovel, it's easy to say, oh, I'm just digging a hole right now. But at another level, you're also always doing far more than just that narrow description of the activity. Because, sure, you're digging a hole, but it could also be you preparing the spot where you're going to plant a tree after that, or bury a body, for that matter. If digging a hole is your job, then digging the hole could also be you making your boss happy. You could be displacing the mole population while digging this hole. You could be getting some exercise. The point is that an educated person should be able to see that the narrowest description of any action is almost never the whole truth when it comes to what that person is doing. So when somebody does something and they say, hey, I'm just doing my job here, or hey, I'm just asking questions, providing for my family, whatever the excuse is. We need our education process to train people to see a broader picture of what the things they're doing are contributing to. And he's saying that this skill is a big part of what we want when someone goes off to school and gets an education. In other words, we want what morality looks like much more under an Aristotelian view of morality, rather than an enlightenment liberal version of morality based on rules and obligations. We want the formation of a person with good judgment who considers as fully as they can the extent of what their actions are doing. And they do this, he thinks, by having a strong understanding of how it all connects to this broader moral intellectual tradition that they're a part of. McIntyre thinks that you can see the danger of not having this judgment written all over modern history. He thinks some of the biggest disasters that we faced in this world have been caused by people with degrees from the best universities. He talks about things like the Vietnam War, American policy towards Iran over the years, the fixes that people come up with in real time during whatever financial crisis we're going through. Again, for him, these are cases where the problem was clearly not a lack of intelligence. It's often smart people who think in a stupidly narrow way because they see the world in too small of a frame. We produce total experts in one area who are deeply unwise in terms of the bigger picture. This is why MacIntyre thinks that education, if you really wanted to talk about the value that it provides to a culture, having people who have practical wisdom inside the tradition they live in, it's what he calls a distribution of judgment that just benefits everyone the more widely it's distributed. First of all, it makes people better moral actors within their tradition. But it Also makes people more aware of what their actions are contributing to. And maybe Most importantly for MacIntyre, this distribution of judgment is something we desperately need. If the people of our culture are going to hold accountable the leaders who will become disconnected from the extent of what their actions are contributing to. This is a real problem for MacIntyre. Leaders get into power and they may start by trying to consider the full effects of their policies and. But when a leader does something reckless and they get up on the screen and they tell people effectively, hey, I'm just digging a hole over here. We need a population of people with the wisdom and judgment to be able to see how their actions are having consequences they're not considering, and then to hold them accountable. I mean, to McIntyre, if you have people in positions of power that are experts in one single area, and then they start spouting off about 10 different other areas that they have no idea about, who can ever really call them out on that? If we live in a world of people who are at best only educated in a single discipline, this, of course, gets even worse when there's a world of people that think it passes as an education to just listen to some rhetorician on a screen, give them all the answers to the world that they should just memorize. Is that education? And the answer is, of course, not education, something we need to take much more seriously to MacIntyre and the modern university becomes ground zero for him if you were looking for an institution to start with. But, you know, it's also important to recognize he's not only coming after the university here in this book. The university is just one institution that emerges out of the logic of encyclopedic thinking. And sure, there's a certain tendency for this to educate people in a pretty narrow way, but if we're being fair here. Are people that go to a university the only people out there that are cutting out philosophy in their lives? Well, definitely not. You see this kind of thinking everywhere. Entire cultures are built around the same view from nowhere kind of reasoning. In his book the tasks of philosophy, MacIntyre takes this critique away from just talking about the university. And he writes about 10 different essays, each one of them designed to point out some area of people's thinking that starts to be lacking when they think of philosophy as a side quest that's optional rather than something that actually grounds every single thing they do in their lives. Let me give a real example of this in the world today. And this is a reference to the chapter where he goes in on the epistemological crisis, a situation many people living today face all the time and. And then are hopeless to deal with without this interrogation of philosophy. I talked to somebody that I've known for years the other day. We only talk every so often. And they're the kind of person that gets all their news about the world from social media. And on this particular day, there was some big, important leader of a country that had supposedly just given a speech. And this person I know had just spent the last two hours seeing all kinds of evidence that this leader was actually dead, that pictures and videos of them were being faked, posted online, fake news stories, fake travel plans. They had just seen dozens of posts made by the real Internet detectives out there who, you know, they'll take a picture and then they circle stuff in the background of the picture in red. They find Bigfoot sitting behind Hillary Clinton at the super bowl, and they figure out all the lies that everyone else is being told that they don't realize they're being told. And this person, clearly in the moment, felt so proud of how they were uniquely in the know here, how they figured out on their social media feed how to get the real information when so many of these other people out there are sheep just flocking towards all the nonsense they're given because they're told to. Then the conversation ended that day with this person. And three, four days later, turns out this leader wasn't actually dead. And this person naturally just moved on to the next thing in their feed where they practically forgot the thing they had such strong opinions about ever even happened. Now, here's MacIntyre's point about all this. This should have been a moment where it leads to something in a person that looks like an epistemological crisis. I mean, to be this brazenly wrong in the criteria you use to determine something's worth believing in, that'd be a moment for a lot of people who are actually interested in the truth, where you very clearly need to reconsider what caused you to believe in such a totally false story. You'd have to do some philosophy, is his point. You'd have to ask, what standards of evidence did I use here? Should those maybe be tightened up a bit? But also, did I want to believe this was true because it made me feel superior to the people that weren't in the know? What larger story do I have about authority and truth that made this feel believable to me? What would have counted as evidence against this while I was still believing it? Once again, having epistemological Assumptions that you base your knowledge on. This isn't something that's optional. Everybody absolutely has them. But if you assume that philosophy was just this hobby some people have, and again not something that actually grounds everything you do in the world, if you see that whole process as optional, you might be tempted to just write off how wrong you are about this thing as simply a one off scenario. Maybe you'd even blame social media for the fact that you were wrong. Oops, guess I was mistaken. No need to take a deeper look at what got me into this place where I was completely deceived the other day. Remember, for Macintyre, philosophy begins when the old answers that used to do the job for someone no longer do the job anymore. But if practically the entire culture is set up so that you don't need to take accountability at this level, then effectively most people just won't. They're just hurried along to the next thing they gotta worry about without ever needing what they believe about the world to be answerable to any kind of real standards, moral or intellectual. Consider how the same thing goes on, by the way, in another common institution in the modern world, the workplace, with where we work obviously taking up at least eight hours of how we think every day for at least five days out of our week. Seriously, what would happen if you were inside of a team meeting talking about what the plan is at the company you work at? And imagine someone raises their hand and they ask a question like, look, before we talk about whether this plan is actually going to work or not, can we first just ask, what is the good? What's the teleological end that this plan is going to bring about in the world? And before we answer that one, what sort of human beings will this plan train us to become if we keep working on it in this way for the next year or so? How will this change us, morally speaking is what I'm asking. They'd be like, oh, okay, yep, thanks for the input there. Now go ahead and sit down and let's focus on the task at hand. You know, if you remember from the after Virtu episode, this is one of the moments MacIntyre thinks that the social role of the manager gains so much power in the world. When we pretend like there's no values that underlie everything we're doing. This is where they get to stand up and do what they do best. They get to say, hey, hey. That's a real interesting question you asked there, Susan. Really interesting. Yeah, I'd love to go out after work and hash all that out with you. I personally am very interested in those kinds of questions myself. But, you know, questions of values like that are not really what we do here in the hall of cubicles we all work in. And again, to MacIntyre, they say all this even though everything that anyone does in that company is loaded with a moral philosophy that never actually gets examined by the people carrying it out. They just get hurried along to the next thing they got to produce and think that any kind of moral analysis of what they're doing, doing belongs in the workplace about as much as it belongs in a university classroom. It's just not what we do here. It's assumed. That said, how do we bring everything that MacIntyre has said in this series together a bit? I guess the first thing to say is that he'd want anybody listening to this in the modern world to recognize that philosophy is not optional in the same kind of a way that having a body is not optional. You are always doing everything rooted in a particular way of life. That everywhere you look, the people you see are already living inside answers to philosophical questions. And this is why that scene in the diner from the beginning of the episode matters so much to him. The modern world has a ton of different ways of taking these real difficult philosophical questions that otherwise would create a kind of existential event in a person's life. And they transform these questions into something else in the seminar. They get turned into simply a professional, professional problem to be solved by technicians in the workplace. It gets called something that's impractical, something you do on your own time in the university. It gets broken up and sent off to 14 different departments that can't ever give us a satisfying answer to it. But when you have the courage to engage in philosophy, he thinks, and really interrogate the answers that aren't doing the job anymore for you. You notice the kind of insights he's given us over these four episodes that we've done on his work in After Virtue. To notice that we're still using moral language that's become a simulacra of what morality used to be and three rival versions. To notice that we're always operating from within a moral tradition is just a matter of how self aware you are of yours independent, rational animals. To notice that our answers to moral questions, like what a human being even is, has a massive impact on how we see everything around us. And now in these two books, to realize that there's been a failure by modern institutions when it comes to producing the wise people. We need to make our moral intellectual tradition continue to to do what we want it to do. A question that he'd want modern people to continue on asking after he unfortunately left us in May of 2025, almost one year to the day of this. The question we got to keep asking is what sort of a world would we have to build for dependent, rational animals like us who are shaped by traditions to become wise enough to see what we're doing and moral enough to continue doing it together? If you value the show as an educational resource patreon.com philosophizethis as usual, I appreciate everybody that comments and keeps the conversation going on the episode page. Always learn a ton from the people that listen to this show. It's also a great place, by the way, to recommend anything you want covered in a future episode of this podcast, so you can do that there too. Book is coming along very nicely for anyone interested. Publishers very happy. Which I guess is that's. That's one kind of gold star to get in a lifetime. Anyway, I hope you have a great rest of your week. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.